About 8 months ago I rather reluctantly joined Facebook, mostly because it was a relatively painfree way to make contact with an intricate web of second cousins in Reggio Calabria during my imminent visit.
Since then, the number of fake profiles and would be scammers I have encountered have given me renewed cause to lament the 2019 demise of Google Plus, which was a far superior social network. Similarly to the fake profiles, the poor quality algorithm continues to feed me repetitious nonsense, such as the same reddit-lifted stories about cheating spouses, wicked stepparents and unfairly favoured children, reinforcing my impression that Facebook is only useful for making contact with people whom, for the most part, I have either lost touch with, or only known about indirectly.
But perhaps what I dislike most about Facebook is the platform it provides for toxic people to rant in an offensive manner about many things – and in a manner which usually involves poor grammar and spelling (something which really offends me).
I usually encounter that sort of offensiveness on one or other of the several Western Bulldogs fan pages I have joined. Where the moderators are either non-existent or weak, such pages have become soap boxes for the most toxic and mono-maniacal supposed barrackers to rant about how the Club needs to immediately sack our coach, Luke Beveridge, and perhaps even our president, she of the hyphenated surname I cannot recollect right now.
I find myself taken aback by such toxicity. Whilst we have had some disappointing seasons during the 9 year reign of Bevo as senior coach, we did win our miracle premiership in 2016 (see above photo for the Brothers Zanatta celebrating on the evening of 1 October 2016) and took us into another Grand Final as recently as 2021, ie approx 32 months ago.
The reality of the situation is that the Footscray Football Club has had a club culture not only inimical of success for many years, but where it was going to fail at each step it took on the final rungs of success. Aside from the 1970s where we would fail at elimination finals, we had the preliminary final defeats of 1985, 1992, 1997, 1998, and so on which made me despondent about us ever making into an actual Grand Final.
And then we had Luke Beveridge, a coach who is some sort of sports psychology guru. He saw that we had a serious cultural barrier in the way of success, where we saw that coming third was good enough for a season, and where the club believed that we could never make the grand final.
In his second season as coach, he destroyed that culture. In four decisive weeks in a row, his team defeated the runners up on the road in Perth, then Hawthorn at the G (Hawthorn being a team we had never beaten in a final in my life, plus setting a record by both winning two finals in a row and two in a year which the Bulldogs had not done in my lifetime), and then set up a grand final appearance by defeating GWS at their home ground somewhere in the obscure suburbia of western Sydney.
And then we won the miracle premiership.
Doing that, coaching a team from a club which has a significant number of cultural and psychological issues preventing them from seizing success, was a much more significant achievement than it would be if you were to do so by coaching a team like Hawthorn, or West Coast, or Carlton, or Essendon. It is a greater achievement than Collingwood breaking its drought in 1990 or Richmond in 2017 or Melbourne in 2021. The only greater possible challenge would be to get St Kilda a flag (FYI, I am old enough to have supervised a colleague whose brother was in the 1966 St Kilda Grand Final team).
The achievement of Luke Beveridge in 2016, in winning an AFL premiership with a club like ours, which did not believe in itself, is hard for outsiders to totally appreciate. For insiders to now revile him is totally graceless and ignorant.
Like, can anyone else achieve that result?
He almost followed it up again in 2021, which is not that long ago. No other coach has been able to get our team into two grand finals, let alone that close to each other in proximity in time.
I do think that this is the Golden Age for the Footscray Football Club. All we need is a Brownlow Medal or two to make it really so.
Bevo has done so much to cause the team to believe that it can achieve what previously was thought impossible for the team, and to cause it through its unpredictability to be feared by the competition at the serious end of the season (ie September).
He needs to be respected for that.
Until we can find a credible coach who might be able to conjure grand final appearances the way that he has, and miracle fairytale premierships, I do think that those toxic critics need to shut up.
Aside from that, I think I need to reflect on the general joy I feel as a Footscray supporter. We rarely ever succeed, and I have only ever met one person who was at the 1954 Grand Final. When we feel the unadulterated joy we get from a premiership like the sheer miracle that was 2016, not only is it sweeter than those which supporters of more successful teams might enjoy, but it also does go a long way to heal us of the suffering and hurt and disappointment we feel when we fall short, like in 1985 or in 1997.
And is not footy an exciting and unpredictable sport? One of the main reasons my dad as a new migrant claimed he got interested in it was its unpredictability. Even if our team does not win that often, we know that it does win sometimes, and that we have a coach who has made it believe that it can win, and has delivered on that.
Is that not enough to continue to love Australian Rules Football and the Western Bulldogs, and to want Bevo to remain as our coach for the foreseeable future?
CARN THE DOGS!!!!
Lost For Words! 